MAKING THIS FILM PROB
Daily Express Saturday May 19 2018
WHEN 22-year-old Josh Edmonds was killed in a road accident in Vietnam in 2011 while on a six-month trip to Asia, his devastated parents were determined to transform their grief in a way that would honour the memory of the laid-back Ministry of Sound producer.
So instead of dedicating a bench or raising money in his name, Jane Harris and her partner Jimmy Edmonds, a Bafta award-winning documentary film editor, decided to take a road trip across the US.
They wanted to meet other bereaved parents in order to make a feature film based on their conversations about grief with a view to having it released in mainstream cinemas. It was, Jane admits, a “madcap idea”.
“When Josh died we thought we could not survive,” she says. “We got stopped in time that day. We changed overnight and we didn’t know what to do. When Jimmy suddenly said, ‘We are going to build Josh’s coffin’, our little village community gathered together and that is what we did.”
But then came a devastating silence that threatened to engulf them. Jane, 62, who works as a therapist in Gloucestershire, found it easier than Jimmy, 68, to be alongside other people’s helplessness in the months after Josh died. “Other people defined me by the fact I was a bereaved mother. I could deal with the platitudes, such as wellmeaning people telling us that Josh ‘was in a better place’ but as a bereaved father Jimmy found it very isolating and difficult to talk to other men. For a while he retreated because he felt very alone.”
Slowly the idea of the film began to emerge. “The film was a journey away from the silence at home, and a metaphor for the journey to acceptance that we went on personally,” says Jane. “It was very important to us not to shy away from the challenge of making it.”
Yesterday the couple achieved their ambition when A Love That Never Dies had its premiere at the Prince Charles cinema in London’s Leicester Square. There will be 20 further screenings around the country over the coming months.
“As a film-maker this has been the hardest project I have ever worked on but as a bereaved father it has probably saved my life,” says Jimmy, who collapsed on his kitchen floor when two young policemen arrived to tell him that his son had been killed in Asia.
“My mind just went into total freefall,” he recalls. “We had the little boy who seemed to grow up so fast to become the troublesome teenager but as soon as we had the more fully developed man, we lost him.”
New York had been the destination of the final holiday the family had enjoyed with Josh the year